Film Review: "The Prestige"
A good twist in the end does not necessarily make a good movie. I found this to be the case when I recently saw The Usual Suspects, already knowing the ending because I had seen the last five minutes at a friend's house before, and was very unimpressed. A film cannot be so preoccupied with confusing and shocking you that it does not also pull you into the characters' lives and make you care what happens to them. The ending of The Usual Suspects was disappointing to me because it made the characters unsympathetic and gave the entire two hours of film I had just watched no meaning. The Prestige, on the other hand, has a twist that makes characters you do not initially sympathize with into more likeable people, and even more, makes a second viewing rewarding rather than meaningless with knowledge of its secrets. This is not just an intelligently constructed mystery with a clever resolution; it is also a great story about human emotions and weakness.
There is a scene with Christian Bale's character, Alfred Borden, showing his wife how he does the magic trick of catching a bullet; the bullet is not loaded in the gun to begin with, but in his hand all the time. "Once you know the secret, it is actually quite obvious," she says. The same can be said of this entire story. The answer to all of the film's questions is so heavily foreshadowed that if you do not guess it before the end you cannot believe you did not see something so glaringly obvious. But that is part of the film's magic.
Borden and Robert Angier (whose name quite appropriately looks like "anger") start out as friendly rivals, magicians with very contrasting points of view about how to do their work. The first exposition of these characters shows us a loving husband who is opposed to trying more dangerous performances (he doesn't want to do a particular disappearing trick that involves killing doves) and a more reckless risk taker very willing to "get his hands dirty" to perform a good magic trick no matter what the cost. When the latter, Borden, is too reckless with the life of Angier's wife as she performs an especially dangerous trick, it results in a bitter rivalry between the two that transforms Angier into a cold and uncompassionate man willing to do much more horrible things than crush birds.
Of course, nothing can spice up the rivalry between two men more than competition for the love of a woman. Scarlett Johansson has been doing a daunting number of roles lately, but for once one of them suits her young age. I was a little amused by how much her character in this film, Olivia, resembled the one she plays in The Black Dahlia. In both, she is in a love triangle with two men who both drive her away because of their obsessions with their work. This film does a much better job than that one of portraying deep obsession, because it happens to Angier very gradually. He is so focused on figuring out how to be a better magician than Borden that he eventually loses focus on the reason he thinks he has to be, until Olivia tells him "It won't bring your wife back" and something slips out of his mouth that is almost enough to make you gasp out loud. His hatred of Borden becomes more about jealousy for what he has than about what he cost him.
This is ultimately a tragedy for nearly all the characters involved. It may be a surprise to you which man is the more traditional kind of tragic hero, flawed but also easy to identify with and feel sorry for. But both of their fates make this a parable about how wanting revenge for past losses and holding grudges only compromises our ability to heal and enjoy what we still have. For me, a second viewing of the movie was more powerful than the first - not in terms of being shocking, but emotionally affecting, for this time I understood how much suffering I was watching and that it was all going to be for no good cause at all.
Whether or not you are able to guess the ending of The Prestige perhaps says something about the kind of person you are. There are those who think it is only a coincidence when a horoscope comes true. They watch a magic card trick sceptically trying to figure out how the magician is doing it instead of believing, just for these few minutes, that it's really magic. They watch a mystery movie second-guessing everything they see and never letting themselves trust it so they can work out that the butler did it before the main character does. Then there are those who would rather not know, because not knowing the truth is so much more interesting. This is not a great film because the secret is very hard to work out; it's a great film because it's really not that hard. As the narrative at the beginning says, "You are looking for the secret, but you won't find it, because you are not really looking. You want to be fooled."